Guest post by The openSUSE community has elected its new board of directors, who will take office in January 2013. Welcome to Raymond Wooninck and Robert Schweikert, who will have a lot of work ahead of them as the board helps navigate openSUSE through some choppy waters. openSUSE remains one of the most popular Linux distros around, but their delayed release of 12.2 in September has led the team to spend the last six months reworking their development process, and both new members are planning to prioritize improvement of openSUSE’s communication strategies as well.
They may have their work cut out for them behind closed doors, but the openSUSE crew tend to put out the most consistently high quality distro around. Great package selection/management tools, excellent community support, toss in the woefully underrated build service and one click installs, yada yada yada and it all adds up to one of the best linux experiences around. That doesn’t even take into account being able to leverage the experience to get into their (Suse’s) commercial offerings.
The tone of the posting seems a little down but I’ll take it the same way I take news about new Debian leaders being appointed: there are challenges in getting a high quality release out the door on a consistent and timely basis, but until the results convince me otherwise, I’ll remain quietly confident.
Wow, great comment – very eloquent and insightful. I share your optimism (I’ve been a SUSE guy since 7.1) but I think the distro could use some good leadership to shake the thing up a bit. One of the distro’s strong points has always been YaST, but YaST has stagnated a bit – think of all the potential it has. The repository management thing is a pain, and I hate I have to refresh them before installing anything (this is something apt-get does very, very well). Lastly, I think openSUSE is struggling to find its niche in the ecosystem along other popular distros. I still love SUSE but find myself more frustrated with it than I was back in the SUSE 8.2 days, and hope the board spurs them into making future releases spectacular. Now that Ubuntu may be floundering a bit, there’s an opportunity for them.
I guess it all comes down to finding their niche. They certainly have all the pieces to put something very special together.
After sitting here for a few minutes and sipping my coffee, I keep coming back to the idea that they should focus more on software integration and being that distro where everything just works. I don’t mean that in the desktop way, I mean that in the server way. Let’s see if I can explain this right. Probably not but whatever.
I’ve been looking at FreeIPA on CentOS/Redhat for a few months now and it seems like a really neat solution. Knowing Redhat, you do the groupinstall and then start tweaking the config files and if you don’t miss anything, it’ll work.
On SUSE/openSUSE, imagine wrapping all that up in YaST. Now factor in the Samba4 release. Now you have something that looks an awful lot like AD, except better, and it works seamlessly across windows and linux. All with GUI management tools that Just Work.
Or maybe extending YaST so that you can generate preconfigured VMs or disk images. Think of it: you go into YaST, select a few modules (DNS/DHCP, Mail, Authentication, VM Host, etc), preconfigure everything everything, press a button and VIOLA! You now have a disk image you can deploy anywhere in your network. All custom tailored and idiot proof.
There are a million and one turn key linux solutions out there but none that I know of that allows you to generate your own turn key solutions in such a brain dead easy manner. And SUSE has all the tools in place to do it and do it right.
They have the 9 month release cycle, which is alright for the DIY and self support crowd. This is something you can easily fold into long term support releases and make a good living on (eg. SUSE proper).
Or maybe they can focus on the cloud of something. There’s money in the cloud. Or tablets. I think there’s money there too.
Edited 2012-12-31 17:23 UTC
Some people keep repeating that, but… http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-10/SquidRepor… (and compare with a year ago http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/ – especially how Ubuntu is the only non-Android distro which really grew, basically all other notable distros decreased)
kde under suse is very greate
i found another distribution with very great kde integration
rosa
http://www.rosalab.com/blogs/rosa-desktopfresh-2012-operating-syste…
like suse, kde finish is realy great, same thing for management tool, also there are some really nice tool they are created.